DSI PhD Excellence Program Course 2023 - Day 1
Materials and slides are accessible at https://github.com/marioangst/susdigi_course
Online booklet with minimal content summaries/ further reading and complete sources:
Mario Angst
Past: 🌊,🌲,🌾,⚡,(🛢) governance
Now: 🏙️ and 🖥️+🍀
Computational Social Science (mostly network analysis, NLP, Bayesian modeling)
Biased toward strong sustainability, bikes and local solutions.
The students can differentiate between sustainability as a normative concept and socio-technical sustainability transformations.
The students are aware of the three core sustainability strategies
The students are able to access current sustainability science literature.
We’ll count to two.
If you are one: Introduce yourself to your neighbour to the right. Discuss (in pairs) for 7 minutes:
What does sustainability mean to you?
Be prepared to introduce your neighbour and what sustainability means to them afterwards.
Worth studying for a bit.
Take five minutes to read through this. This is the text ©️
Does anything surprise you? Discuss with your neighbor to the left (for ones) and be prepared to share your thoughts.
intra- and intergenerational justice is front and center
but there were/ are many other sustainability definitions
It all comes down to substitution of natural capital for future generations
weak sustainability: substitution is ok given function is retained and utility non-declining
strong sustainability: natural capital needs to be at least maintained
🤯 Beware of “nature” 🍃
We don’t talk about the three pillars
So sustainability is an interconnected problem of distributive justice and resource use. Behold the three strategies everyone should be aware of in order to reduce resource use:
We’ll form four groups.
We will take ten minutes to gather as many examples of:
you can associate with one of the four strategies.
… (economic) activity from resource use
Things become more sociological.
Futures of sustainability. “In a certain sense, a sustainable world is a fiction” (Martens 2006, 40):
weak sustainability, “green growth”
https://radicaloceanfutures.earth/
strong sustainability, post-growth, solidarity economy
https://radicaloceanfutures.earth/
resilience, inevitability and emergency
powerful entities solve crises with emergency powers
https://radicaloceanfutures.earth/
Take a walk with your neighbour to the right (for ones). Be back in twelve minutes. Prepare to share your thoughts with the group.
https://radicaloceanfutures.earth/
Planetary boundaries
Doughnut economics and post-growth
The Anthropocene
honorable mention: leverage points
Azote for Stockholm Resilience Centre, based on analysis in Persson et al 2022 and Steffen et al 2015
https://www.kateraworth.com/doughnut/
… questions everything.
nature-culture dichotomies
is there an “environment”?
How to intervene in complex systems?
Fischer and Riechers, p. 117
Understanding the socio-technical change processes.
How do radical changes happen in specific, large socio-technical systems?
EEA 2019, based on Geels (2006)
Social-ecological systems perspective
Institutional navigation
Ostrom 2014
Lubell and Morrison 2021, p. 665
15 minutes
For our purposes: Socio-technical consequences of digitization, the conversion of analogue streams of information into digital form
Argument: What and how to digitize is always a decision, as well as regulation and non-regulation of its socio-technical consequences.
Why do we digitize? Let’s discuss.
Pick two of the reading materials referenced at any point in the online booklet accompanying the course at https://marioangst.github.io/susdigi_course/.
Read them and be prepare to share your thoughts on it.
Sustainable Digitalization - A primer